NSA recording ‘100 %’ of another country’s phone calls

A secret spy program developed by the National Security Agency and reported publically for the first time on Tuesday has given the United States the ability to digitally record the contents of each and every phone call occurring across entire nations.

Citing previously unpublished documents provided by former NSA
contractor Edward Snowden and statements from individuals with
direct knowledge of the effort, the Washington Post’s Barton
Gellman and Ashkan Soltani wrote that the US-administered surveillance
system is capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign
country’s telephone calls.

The program, “MYSTIC,” was launched back in 2009, according to
the Post, but by 2011 it was ready to be rolled-out at full
capacity and was subsequently deployed against at least one
target nation. The Post says they are withholding details
“that could be used to identify the country where the system
is being employed or other countries where its use was
envisioned” upon the request of US officials.

Once it was ready to put to the test in 2011, MYSTIC and its
“retrospective retrieval” tool known as RETRO were being used to
indiscriminately record “every single” conversation
occurring across the entire target country, the Post reported.

Those calls — “billions,” according to the Post — are
stored for 30 days, and the oldest conversations are purged as
new ones are logged. Once the content entered the NSA’s system,
however, analysts are able to go back and listen in as much as a
month later to find information on a person who might never have
been suspected of a crime at the time that their initial
conversation was collected unbeknownst to them by the US
government.

Unlike the surveillance effort previously exposed by Mr. Snowden
in which the US intelligence community compels telecommunication
companies for the metadata pertaining to millions of Americans on
a regular basis, the latest program to be exposed does more than
divulge the basic user info and call duration details provided by
metadata. Combined, MYSTIC and RETRO let the NSA collect the
actual voiced communications of foreign parties, and without
requiring the agency to explain why. Instead, the program
systemically logs actual content, which the NSA can choose to
disseminate at a later time if and when it decides to.

The Post said that documents provided by Mr. Snowden, a former
systems administrator who has exposed a number of previously
secret NSA programs since last June, was corroborated by
government officials, including one senior manager who equated
the surveillance system’s capabilities as being akin to a
“time machine.”

By storing that data in a 30 day buffer, the NSA is allowed to
get a glimpse “into the past,” according to an excerpt
of an official summary quoted by Gellman and Soltani, enabling
analysts to “retrieve audio of interest that was not tasked
at the time of the original call.”

“No other NSA program disclosed to date has swallowed a
nation’s telephone network whole,” the journalists
acknowledged.

And soon, they added, the surveillance could spread elsewhere.
According to the Post reporters, classified documents disclosed
by Snowden suggest that blanketing spy programs could be extended
to other countries abroad “if it has not been already.”
One document reportedly suggests that MYSTIC was planned to be
put in place across six countries as of last October.

But while the NSA is barred from specifically targeting the
conversations of Americans by way of blanketing spy programs such
as MYSTIC, the Post warned that US persons are most certainly
having their cell phone conversations sucked up if they call
seemingly anyone located in a country where the program is
carried out.

“Present and former US officials, speaking on the condition
of anonymity to provide context for a classified program,
acknowledged that large numbers of conversations involving
Americans would be gathered from the country where RETRO
operates,” the Post reported. “The NSA does not attempt
to filter out their calls, defining them as communications
‘acquired incidentally as a result of collection directed against
appropriate foreign intelligence targets.’”

Vanee Vines, a spokesperson for the NSA, declined to comment
specifically on MYSTIC or RETRO, but told the Post that
“continuous and selective reporting of specific techniques
and tools used for legitimate US foreign intelligence activities
is highly detrimental to the national security of the United
States and of our allies, and places at risk those we are sworn
to protect.”

The NSA’s work, Vines added, is “strictly conducted under the
rule of law.”

Gellman and Soltani’s article — and the NSA’s subsequent response
— comes only days after the United National Human Rights
Committee questioned US delegates about the
surveillance programs disclosed by Mr. Snowden since last year.
According to the UN panel, some experts have suggested that
“there would be no protection of rights at all” if other
countries emulated the NSA’s activities as reported.